Beverly Hills Cop

Saw this at the BFI as part of their 'Black Star' season. Although Eddie Murphy carries the film, was interesting that the role was once intended for Sylvester Stallone, and the script doesn't make many overt references to Murphy's blackness. Only occasionally does Murphy's character nod to it – when he accuses hotel staff of prejudice in order to get a room, and when he's shaming another black cop for playing at being white. In both situations, Murphy is playing mindgames with his mark in order to gain the upper hand. In fact, that's what he does throughout the film. His blackness is just another tool used to overcome the obstacles in his way.

It struck me that the film also contained a faintly homoerotic subtext. Murphy goes to California to avenge the murder of a childhood friend – someone who confesses he loves him before being killed. If it was sexual love, it was probably unrequited (Murphy flirts a bit with the only female character in the film, who becomes a damsel-in-distress at the end). But the relationship is strong enough to provide the motive for Murphy's actions throughout the film. Murphy does pretend to be gay in another scene in order to gain admittance to a private members club. And he has some memorable interactions with 'Serge', a camp employee at an art gallery. But the film's gayness, like its blackness, is understated. It's almost as if too many mentions of racism or AIDS would spoil the fun.

The other interesting thing about the film is its pacing. It kicks off with a very long-winded and expensive car chase, which apart from establishing Murphy's recklessness,i is entirely gratuitous. It goes to show that (like the intros of Bond films) frontloading action sequences is not a new phenomenon. That said, compared to modern action films, the pacing in Beverly Hills Cop turns out to be rather loose – the film lingers on not very important details, sometimes purposefully to frustrate the audience who want to find out what's happening elsewhere. It's hard to imagine getting away with that kind of thing in today's hyper-compressed blockbusters – where missing a stray bit of dialogue renders the plot incomprehensible. Instead Beverly Hills Cop is a film you can drift in and out of without losing your bearings, and it feels longer than its 105 minutes. It gives you a break. I for one found it a welcome reprieve.

46 books for 2016

My annual list of things I've read grows longer again this year, partly because I continue to abjure television and get my fill of visual storytelling through comics. The reason for the preference is mundane – I spend too much of my day in front of a screen and prefer to avoid it in my free time. I may well be missing out. Given the stranglehold superheroes have on the comics medium, and how everyone keeps talking about a golden age of television, my guess is that comics in aggregate may well be less innovative or interesting.

My comics consumption has been further encouraged by my agreeing to contribute columns to the London Graphic Novel Network, an initiative designed to get people to take advantage of the great selection of comics offered by London libraries. I owe my comics enthusiasm entirely to libraries (they are otherwise a very expensive form of entertainment), so this was a no-brainer for me. Links to my bits for the site are collected here.

I've also read quite a lot of Japanese fiction this year – my partner is Japanese, so it has been a way of getting to know the culture in which she grew up. It's a bit of a turnaround for me, as I'd previously avoided reading literature in translation, assuming that too much of the author's technique was lost in the process. I still think that's the case, but what you gain is still a pretty direct insight into a foreign society and history, which is hugely valuable in itself.

A lot of the non-fiction is drawn from recommendations at work (Haidt, Moretti), or following up things from the MA I did six years ago (Ryan, Tully, Geuss).

Ordered (sort of) by subject then preference. Links in the comics section go to things I've written (mostly for the LGGN), otherwise they are quotes I've posted here as I've been reading. I keep track of all this stuff on Goodreads here.

Richard Ellmann - James Joyce [link]
Alan Ryan - On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present [link] [link]
Jonathan Haidt - The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Ian Buruma - The Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture
James Tully - An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts
Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Richard Vinen - Thatcher's Britain: The politics and social upheaval of the 1980s
Enrico Moretti - The New Geography of Jobs
Gareth Stedman Jones - Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
Michel Foucault - Interviews & Other Writings 1977-84 [link] [link]
Simon Parker - Taking Power Back: Putting people in charge of politics
Hugh Kennedy - The Great Arab Conquests [link]

Ben Thompson - Seven Years of Plenty: A Handbook of Irrefutable Pop Greatness, 1991-1998
J. Hoberman - Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?
Jessica Hopper - The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic
Raymond Geuss - History and Illusion in Politics [link]

James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ryū Murakami - Almost Transparent Blue
Yasunari Kawabata - Thousand Cranes
Mari Akasaka - Vibrator

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki - Seven Japanese Tales
Ryū Murakami - Piercing
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki - Some Prefer Nettles [link]
Yōko Ogawa - Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales

Kieron Gillen / Jamie McKelvie - Phonogram [link]
Grant Morrison / Chris Weston / Gary Erskine - The Filth [link]
Warren Ellis / Jason Howard - Trees, Vol. 1: In Shadow [link]
Hayao Miyazaki - Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Greg Rucka / Michael Lark / Santi Arcas - Lazarus
Matt Fraction / Christian Ward - Ody-C vols. 1 & 2 [link]
Gail Simone / Walter Geovani - Red Sonja [link]
Kazuo Koike / Ryōichi Ikegami - Offered
Magnus - The 100 Pills
Paul Pope - 100% / Heavy Liquid [link]
Jonathan Hickman / Ryan Bodenheim - Red Mass for Mars
Jonathan Luna / Sarah Vaughn - Alex + Ada [link]
Kieron Gillen / Ryan Kelly / Jordie Bellaire - Three [link]
Matt Fraction / Howard Chaykin - Satellite Sam vols. 1 & 2 [link]
Ben Gijsemans - Hubert [link]

Kentaro Miura - Berserk vol. 1

Sean McKeever / Brian Fraim - The Waiting Place vol. 1

Kelly Sue DeConnick / Emma Ríos - Pretty Deadly, Vol. 1: The Shrike

Rick Remender / Wes Craig / Lee Loughridge - Deadly Class, Vol. 1: Reagan Youth

Mark Waid / Minck Oosterveer - The Unknown

Grant Morrison / Yanick Paquette / Nathan Fairbairn - Wonder Woman: Earth One

Bryan Lee O'Malley - Seconds

Beckett was addicted to silences, and so was Joyce; they engaged in conversations which consisted often of silences directed towards each other, both suffused with sadness, Beckett mostly for the world, Joyce mostly for himself. Joyce sat in his habitual posture, legs crossed, toe of the upper leg under the instep of the lower; Beckett, also tall and slender, fell into the same gesture. Joyce suddenly asked some such question as, 'How could the idealist Hume write a history?' Beckett replied, 'A history of representations.' Joyce said nothing, but some time afterwards he informed the young man, 'The only amateur philosopher of any value I know is Carducci.' Later, 'For me,' he said, 'there is only one alternative to scholasticism, scepticism.' - Richard Ellmann, James Joyce

Your Name

I've previously been a bit harsh on Matoko Shinkai. Your Name doesn't abandon the romantic longing of 5 Centimeters Per Second, but the angst is worn more lightly, and the characters feel less like ciphers. The animation is also more restrained – the night skies no longer look like Rainbow Road in Mario Kart, and there is a rather cool dream sequence which swaps crisp photorealism for a more flowing, sketched style.

The plot, as with many a time travel story, breaks apart the more you prod at it. But the conceit of two teenagers switching bodies is employed well. Shinkai has said that some of the town vs country stuff comes from his own experience of growing up. More important for me, however, is the way inhabiting another person's life becomes a metaphor for falling in love. Because being in a relationship is sort of like that. You gain access to memories of things you didn't experience at first hand. You learn about a childhood different from your own, with a new family and set of friends. You also get to know someone else's body in intimate detail (a source of some of the film's funniest moments). And by becoming comfortable in each other's skins, the two characters find that they cannot live happily without each other.

This is eked out a bit in the final part of the film, where Shinkai contrives to separate his heroes, and have them morosely wander around Tokyo searching for their other halves. But it serves to highlight how draining the loss of such a person might be, and it leads to a very satisfying finale.

The Tit and the Moon

This film continues Bigas Luna's interrogation of cajones from his previous film Golden Balls. It begins and ends with the Catalan tradition of creating human castles. Our protagonist Tete is a enxaneta, the child who is supposed to climb to the top and touch the sky. At the beginning of the film, his father's shouted exhortations about having the balls to climb higher always make Tete lose. At the end, Tete has discovered women and love, the desire for which allows him to achieve his goal, and find contentment.

It's a happy ending, in other words – the opposite of what happens to Javier Bardem in Golden Balls, who fails to complete his tower and ends up an unhappy cuckold. Rather than castigate self-defeating machismo, The Tit and the Moon celebrates the state of being lovesick. It's at its most charming when exploring the fascinatingly weird marriage between the dancer Estrellita and a Frenchman mostly referred to as 'The Frog'. Estrellita is turned on by tears and feet, and plays weird sexual games with her husband where she eats a stale baguette that he sticks between his thighs. The Frog is impotent, but the marriage survives by the arrangement of a ménage à trois, and he (unlike Bardem) ends up a happy cuckold.

The yearning for the love of women appears to be the overriding theme – the film has its own peculiar cosmology where the patriarchal sun is superseded by the matriarchal moon. Nonetheless, the erotic focus of the film – Estrellita – is a rather passive figure, remaining devoted to her husband despite his neediness and volatility. The film opens with the image of her as a toybox ballerina, echoing her husband's claim to want to put her in a box and hide her away (he's true to his word and locks her up at one point). And although the film suggests that fulfillment lies with the renunciation of such jealousy, Estrellita is still little more than an idol to be fought over. Her fate is not enviable, even if she appears satisfied with it.

The Ring Finger

This is a curious film – more of an extended allegory than any kind of straightforward narrative. It's an adaptation of a short story by Yoko Ogawa, who specializes in eerie tales of weird people and their strange, sometimes dangerous, desires. Olga Kurylenko abandons the prospect of a normal life with a regular working class hunk, and chooses instead to become a living 'specimen'. Her employer is an older man who runs a business purging customers of painful memories. They pay a fee to have certain objects of talismanic power taken away and stored, alongside what appear to be ghosts of the man's own past.

Kurylenko's own painful memory is of the tip of her ring finger being sliced off in an accident at a bottling factory – perhaps a symbol for the way entry into the workforce mangles the traditional role of women as wives and mothers. If that's the case, she nonetheless settles for becoming an object in the house of a controlling patriarch. Her employer seduces her, and gives her a pair of red shoes that become a symbol of her subjection to him. At the end of the film, she takes them off in contravention of his wishes, but chooses to give her ring finger to him as a 'specimen'. She slips off one ring, but surrenders a much more intimate part of herself, and joins his nunnery-cum-harem.

The film is made cheaply, and it shows, but Bertrand injects a certain style into it, using frames within frames and adding surreal flourishes like Kurylenko's dream of swinging on a enormous crane. A particularly nice set-piece is the dropping of the Majong set – an entire philosophy shattered then put back together again. The mood is helped enormously by a very effective score from Beth Gibbons (of Portishead fame), which is by turns sweet and sinister. Staying true to Ogawa's fiction, the film leaves motivations opaque and the ending unexplained. But piecing together its confluence of symbols is a diverting way to spend 100 minutes.

Ms Marvel

A bit of my tiny contribution to the epic London Graphic Novel Network discussion on the book by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona, which is worth reading in full:

What is interesting for me about Ms Marvel is that her superpower is to change her appearance. Being a teenager is partly about experimenting with different looks and identities, and in Kamala’s case her shapeshifting brings out the (mostly subconscious) pressure she feels to conform to a certain western beauty standard – something which is not readily available to her because of her race. It’s quite a powerful moment in the comic when you realise that she is not going to take advantage of the ability she suddenly gets to appear white, blond, sexy, etc. Instead, maintaining that surface-level disguise is a distraction from the real work of saving the day. She commissions a real costume so she doesn’t have to worry about what she looks like anymore.

Rashomon

The device of different characters presenting different versions of the same event is less interesting than the reasons why their presentations are different. The fact that a camera is subjective should be obvious to anyone with a passing interest in film. What bears thinking about is the different subjectivities behind what the camera reveals (and conceals).

So why don't we take each version in turn. First the bandit Tajōmaru, who confesses to killing the samurai and seducing his wife. Tajōmaru is a free spirit, aroused by the winds, swinging his sword in the same way he swings his dick (the film is not subtle about drawing the parallel). His story is one of derring do, and he casts out this attitude onto the other characters. In his universe, the wife is a wilful defender of her interests – she tries to fight him off, and lays down the gauntlet of the duel. The samurai fights honourably, but both him and the wife are defeated by Tajōmaru's superior prowess. He remains unbeaten, and is laid low by a freak accident of nature.

The wife presents herself as a victim of Tajōmaru's depredations and her husband's coldness. She does not set up a duel between the two men – Tajōmaru simply leaves. She is so dutiful that she frees her husband and begs to be killed so she does not have to live with the shame of her rape. When he refuses in disgust, she loses her mind, and kills him almost by accident. She then tries, and fails, to kill herself. Throughout, she shows herself to be feeble, weak-minded, and a failure – perhaps hoping the appearance of a docile and repentant femininity will garner the sympathy of the court.

The samurai's story is delivered through a medium (which is ridiculous, although the film just about manages to overcome this – mainly because the actress is rather unsettling in the role, and because of the eerie effects put on her voiceover). The samurai is betrayed by an unfaithful wife, who asks Tajōmaru to kill him and free her from an unhappy marriage. The bandit is disgusted, and instead frees the samurai – both are bound together in condemnation of womankind. In the end, the samurai is brave enough to kill himself, even though he is plunged into hell for the misdeeds of others.

The impartial observer of these events, the woodcutter, undercuts the male bravado of the previous tales. Tajōmaru falls in love with the wife, who scorns and mocks him and her husband for being too weak to win her with their swords. She sets up the duel, which is pusillanimous and shambolic. There is no glory in the encounter – in the end the woodcutter sneaks out to steal the valuable dagger that has been left behind. Male virility and heroism turns out to be so much pathetic boasting.

It is interesting that the three each confess to being the agent of the death – the bandit out of pride, and the couple as a way of showing themselves to be more noble than the other. The marriage – which looked so perfect when we first see it, proves to be built on mutual resentments, which Tajōmaru's assault brings to the fore.

Whether this is enough to tip us into an apocalypse is arguable. Rashomon is a burnt-out husk of a place, ravaged by war, famine, banditry and natural disasters. The dregs of humanity seek shelter under the barrage of natural and moral evils. Kurosawa's interest in the lack of moral certainty, and the inability for human beings to agree on the truth, suggests a preoccupation with the crumbling of national solidarity in post-war Japan. But again, this is less interesting than the interplay of jealousy, resentment, vanity, desire and violence that structures the incident at the centre of the story. It is those psychological revelations that make the film a great piece of work.

Ashes of Time Redux

The template for Hsiao-Hsien's The Assassin, which came out to universal acclaim at the start of this year. Again, the plot is so well known (based on a novel which is like the Chinese The Lord of the Rings) that its explication is felt unnecessary. Again, the martial arts are almost incidental. I think there can only be about 15 minutes of actual fighting in the 90 minute running time. There is ample room for the director's concerns, and flashy style, to predominate.

My sense is that Wong Kar-Wai always ends up preferring to spend his hours examining romantic renunciation. Love in Ashes of Time blooms only in an environment of betrayal. Marriages are cages our heroes yearn to escape from. They never do, which is how Wong builds up the dramatic weight in his films. Instead, we are left holding onto memories – often painful, and constantly fading. That, I assume, is what the film's title refers to.

I'm extrapolating from In The Mood For Love, which I found frustrating. Ashes of Time worked better for me, perhaps because its contrivances are entirely on the surface, and you don't feel like you're being manipulated. The film is elliptical about its plot, but entirely upfront about its themes. The characters tell you, in long soliloquies and monologues.

I guessed that In The Mood For Love left the possibility open for the two suffering lovers to consummate their affair – Maggie Cheung's son being the result. Interestingly, Ashes of Time repeats this motif almost exactly – Cheung (again!) also has a son, whose father may be our protagonist, rather than the man Cheung married. Her reflections as she watches her son out of the window is the most beautiful part of the film (incidentally, it's the only bit shot in a studio).

There is a sense here that a new generation will abandon the stifled, clandestine romantic lives of the past. But Wong appears fixated on them. Happy marriages, like that of the shoeless swordsman, are a joke. They involve compromise. Real love is about not giving in, and being alone – pining nobly for a beloved who is either far away, or dead.